This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Where researchers go, their knowledge goes. And that shapes where innovation happens.
"Recruiting researchers is one way institutions gain new knowledge and steer their research in particular directions," explains Vito D. Servedio, senior scientist at CSH. To learn more about whom institutions hire, how many new research topics those hires bring, and how institutions develop thematically over time, a team from CSH, in collaboration with Leiden University, reconstructed the career paths of 9.3 million researchers across 3,965 institutions worldwide.
To do so, they analyzed 25 million scientific publications and traced the publication histories of their authors between 2000 and 2020. The study has been published in the journal Scientometrics. Compared with one another, research institutions grew more similar in their research topics, the team found.
Servedio found this surprising. "I expected institutions to develop more distinct profiles," he says. "Diversity in research can be valuable, because we often don't know what knowledge we'll need next." Within institutions, new hires generally fit well with the existing research profile.
"The research topics of newcomers closely match those of the scientists already there," Servedio says. On a scale from 0 (no overlap) to 1 (identical topics), the median topic alignment is 0.84. In other words, at half of the institutions studied, alignment is even higher than 0.84.
At the other half, it is lower. "We're not talking about broad fields like molecular biology or quantum physics," study author and CSH president Stefan Thurner notes. "We're talking about very narrow, specific research topics." The team used an established classification distinguishing between 4,163 of them.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
